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We’re pleased to announce that from today all Model B Raspberry Pis will ship with 512MB of RAM as standard. If you have an outstanding order with [RS Components or element14/Premier Farnell], you will receive the upgraded device in place of the 256MB version you ordered. Units should start arriving in customers’ hands today, and we will be making a firmware upgrade available in the next couple of days to enable access to the additional memory.

According to the post, the additional memory “would enable some interesting embedded use cases (particularly using Java) which are slightly too heavyweight to fit comfortably in 256MB.”

Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.

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This is a little disappointing. I thought the raspberry pi is an aid to promote learning how to program. Part of learning how to program is learning how to deal with the limitations of the device your programming for.

http://gravatar.com/mediagato Mofo

That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve read all day. Who doesn’t want more ram? Especially at the same price. Also, since when do programmers not fatten the code up to use more resources than the devices already have? It’s how they make systems crawl so you buy a new one.

Pro-Assassin

Well i guess I’m wrong. Let me ask you this. What would the ideal spec be for for a computer designed specifically to help teach programming to beginners.

Jaxidian

A counter-question: What percentage of developers need to worry about programming for devices with less than 512MB of RAM? That is by no means the “typical developer’s” concern today nor will it be in the future.

I understand, and agree, that developers needs to keep in mind efficiency. However, the majority of developers today are (rightfully) less concerned with memory resources and more concerned with time resources. If you NEED to be concerned with only using 256MB instead of 512MB of RAM, then you can probably gain EVEN MORE knowledge and experience by being required to develop something to help you monitor your memory usage. Or do you think profiling is not a worthy skill for these students to learn?

Pro-Assassin

I think your missing the point. I’m saying there was nothing wrong with the original raspberry pi spec.Most people who are starting out as programmers will never need 256mb. think back over the years of computer development and what was achieved on machines with much lower specs. it seems the raspberry pi will be yet another platform for the experience programmers to port there emulators and media players rather than a cheap learning tool.

http://www.facebook.com/david.grayson David Grayson

There will always be limitations and obstacles that you can learn from on any computing platform, not matter how much RAM it has. This upgrade makes more things possible with the Raspberry Pi, so there are more things you can learn.

http://www.stuffedcabbageinc.com Christian Restifo

If doubling the RAM to 512 MB is bad, why was 256 MB better than 128? Why not just give users only 64K to help them learn better programming? Why not just 32K? Heck, my old Atari 400 did fine on 16K. If it was good enough back then, it should be good now.

http://twitter.com/psantimauro Peter Santimauro (@psantimauro)

Are the new boards going to be available in the MakerShed any time soon? I told my wife I wanted one for Xmas and sent her the link to the board with 256MB of RAM in the shed. If you guys are going to be getting the new ones, I would like to tell her to hold off until they become available .

Michael Castor

We’ll have them next week, just watch for the announcement!

Tweedle

I have to agree with Mofo; why in the world would you be disappointed with doubling the RAM? Learning to program is pretty straight forward and having extra space to do extra things is a plus. DUH!

http://twitter.com/bwente Brian Wente (@bwente)

I hope the one I ordered last week from the MakerShed will be upgraded!

http://twitter.com/bwente Brian Wente (@bwente)

I just got the one I ordered from Newark (before they were available on the MakerShed). Pleasantly surprised that they upgraded it to the new 512MB. Yay!! I hope the MakerShed will do the right thing ;)

http://twitter.com/bwente Brian Wente (@bwente)

:( @MakerShed
I was shipped the 256MB version. I know that’s what was listed, but that’s also what was listed on the element14 website and the upgraded mine before it shipped. The irony is that I ordered mine from them first and they were back ordered. So I went and ordered one from the Maker Shed since they were in stock.

rocketguy1701

Yay more RAM! Wonder if Adafruit’s distro will make use of it…

http://www.facebook.com/wolfgang.beer.7 Wolfgang Beer

i love these open hardware platforms such as Arduino that is based on a microcontroller and Raspberry Pi, that is a full 32bit multimedia engine. Now i found an additional platform that enables the open hardware approach for parallel processing, http://www.smartlab.at/parallel-computing-platform-for-makers